Madonna joined Sabrina Carpenter on the Coachella stage in a surprise appearanceCredit: SuppliedThe hand-holding duo were a hit with the Californian crowdsCredit: YouTube/Coachella
Two decades after her own epic headlining slot at the Californian festival, the queen of pop turned heads in a flesh-flashing frilly outfit.
Wearing a purple corset with matching lilac gloves, purple stockings and knee-high stiletto boots, the comeback queen accessorised with tinted shades and her long blonde hair down in waves.
She joined a lingerie-clad Sabrina, 26, who wowed in a white lace sparkly bodice and heels during her headline set at Coachella.
The duo delighted the crowds with classic hits including Vogue, Like A Prayer and I Feel So Free from Madonna’s new album.
Sabrina had been mid-performance when an instrumental tease of Madonna‘s 1990 hit song Vogue weaved in.
Madonna told the cheering audience: “Wow, thank you.
“Sabrina, thank you so much for inviting me on your show.”
Holding hands, she replied: “No thanks needed, Madonna.”
“Well, I have a few things I want to get off my chest. So, 20 years ago today I performed at Coachella,” admitted the Ray of Light singer.
“I was in the dance tent and it was the first time I performed Confessions On The Dance Floor part one in America.
“It’s a full circle moment, you know? Very meaningful for me.”
She urged: “Let’s try to be together. Let’s try to avoid disagreements.
“And to that point, the great thing about music is that it brings people together.
“It’s the one place that people have to put their differences aside, put their s**t down and just everybody have a good time together, right?
“So I am thrilled to be a part of that healing experience…”
The Vogue singer confirmed this week that she will release her first record in seven years this July — a sequel to her 2005 smash Confessions On A Dance Floor.
The original, inspired by disco and Eighties electropop, shifted more than 10million copies.
It featured No1 singles Hung Up and Sorry, and ushered in a new era of dance music.
In 2024, Sabrina paid tribute to Madge by attending the MTV VMAs in a vintage strapless gown previously worn to the Oscars by her musical hero in 1991.
Sabrina said of Madonna last year: “She’s so lovely and exactly how you expect her to be — just, like, so magnetic.”
The Please Please Please singer has thrilled fans sharing a photo dump containing some sizzling snapsof her festival stint – including a mini dress, knee-high boots and beret combo.
The pair dueted on hits including Vogue and Like A PrayerCredit: SuppliedThe crowds watched in awe as the superstars performed togetherCredit: YouTube/CoachellaIt marked 20 years after Madonna’s headline set at CoachellaCredit: YouTube/CoachellaSabrina shared pictures of her Coachella experience in a range of cute outfitsCredit: Instagram
Inara George looks back on it now as wistfully as someone remembering a love affair or a semester abroad.
“It was at this tiny theater on Pico near LaBrea, next to a barbecue place,” she says. “Our backstage was behind the theater, so we’d sit out there wearing these crazy corseted outfits while the guy next door was smoking brisket.”
A fixture of the Los Angeles music scene known for her solo records and as half of the Bird and the Bee, George is recalling the summer she spent working as a 20-something actor in “The Wandering Whore,” a musical set in 18th century London by composer Eliot Douglass and lyricist Philip Littell that played L.A.’s Playwrights’ Arena in August 1997.
“There was a scene where I die,” George adds, “and then I get reanimated by a ghost and someone pays — I don’t know if you need to put this in the article — someone pays to have relations with me.” She sighs.
“It was just such a rich time.”
Three decades later, George’s warm feelings for that era — and especially for the duo who soundtracked it — have led to an exquisite new album, “Songs of Douglass & Littell,” on which she sets aside her own songwriting to interpret nine tunes by these under-the-radar veterans of West Coast musical theater: searching, funny, vividly emotional songs like “Tired Butterfly,” about a busy insect in search of “a little nap,” and “The Extra Nipple,” which ponders a “harsh encounter with another heart.”
Think of the record as George’s take on one of Ella Fitzgerald’s classic “Song Book” LPs from the late ’50s and early ’60s, when the jazz star was systematically enshrining the work of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and other authors of the Great American Songbook.
“These men deserve to have some attention,” George says of Douglass and Littell, the latter of whom she’s known since she was a little girl performing in plays at Topanga Canyon’s Theatricum Botanicum. “I want to give them their flowers.”
Yet if the album is rooted in the creative awakenings of George’s youth, it’s also the 51-year-old’s way of embracing middle age.
Inspired by singers like Helen Merrill and Chet Baker — “Elis & Tom,” a 1974 duo album by Brazil’s Elis Regina and Antônio Carlos Jobim, was another touchstone — George turns on “Songs” from the Bird and the Bee’s blippy electronica and the folky pop of her solo work to a jazzier sound that puts her cool, breathy vocals amid piano, strings and horns.
“This is a grown-up record,” says George, who shares three teenage children with her husband, the movie director Jake Kasdan. “I don’t want to be making music that makes me feel like I’m trying to be younger — I wanted to make something that makes me feel my age.”
Inara George at home this month.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The singer is at home near Griffith Park on a recent afternoon; with her kids at school and Kasdan away on a film shoot, the house is quiet, though signs of music are everywhere: a drum set, a grand piano, a guitar once owned by George’s late father, Lowell George, who founded the cult-fave L.A. rock band Little Feat and who died of a heart attack when Inara was only 4.
“As a woman, it’s a weird time in life — there’s something in-between about it,” she says. “Even the question of what do you wear. When you’re younger, you’re like, I’m gonna wear a dress — is it sexy, is it cute? Now, all of a sudden, all I want to do is wear suits.” She laughs.
Douglass, who plays piano on the new album, hears a “groundedness” in George’s singing all the more remarkable given that the arrangements represent “a new kind of school for her,” he says. “I was wondering how she would approach it, and she’s done it with such aplomb and wisdom.”
On Friday night, Douglass will accompany George — along with more than a dozen other players — in a record-release concert at Largo at the Coronet, with proceeds going to the nonprofit LA Voice, which seeks to organize voters on issues related to immigration and affordable housing.
George happily describes “Songs of Douglass & Littell” as a passion project. “I think you get to a certain point where selling a million records is not your intention,” she says. “Obviously, I wouldn’t make a record like this if I had that intention.” (Counterpoint: the arena-filling success of Laufey.)
“I’m just about the experience,” she adds, “and this has been an amazing experience.”
The experience began one night a few years ago when George hosted a wine-soaked reunion of performers who’d worked with Douglass and Littell back in the ’90s on shows like “The Wandering Whore” and “No Miracle: A Consolation,” the latter a song cycle rooted in the losses of the AIDS epidemic.
Philip Littell, from left, Eliot Douglass and Inara George.
(Thomas Heegard)
After her years of childhood dramatics at the Theatricum — Littell remembers meeting “this bird of a girl with these huge eyes” — George had gone to Boston’s Emerson College to study acting but dropped out and returned to L.A., where she eventually made her name as a musician. (In addition to the Bird and the Bee, her duo with the Grammy-winning producer Greg Kurstin, she’s also played with the Living Sisters and sung with Foo Fighters.)
Yet her postcollege stint in the experimental theater scene always stuck with her, she says. Reconnecting with Littell, whose other work includes the libretto for André Previn’s operatic adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and Douglass, who played piano for years with Cirque du Soleil, got George thinking about how she might help preserve their music and bring it to a modern audience.
In 2024, she put together a trio for an intimate gig at Pasadena’s Healing Force of the Universe record store; her old friend Mike Andrews, who produced her solo albums, was there and told her they should record the material. Given the number of ballads she’d worked up, George asked Douglass and Littell to write a couple of new uptempo tunes; among the ones they came up with was the frisky “La Lune S’en Va.”
Does George speak French?
“Not at all,” she says, smiling. “But Philip does. It’s so fun — I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take it.’ I think the pronunciation’s OK.”
She and a small crew of musicians cut the album live in the studio over three days — in part an attempt to capture some energy, in part an acknowledgment of an economic reality.
“Is music just a hobby for me now? Yeah, it is,” says George, who’s putting “Songs” out through her own label, Release Me Records. “I mean, I’m spending money to do it.” She worries about the disappearance of music’s middle class even as she notes happily that “Again & Again” by the Bird and the Bee “recently had a little TikTok moment,” as she puts it. (With 86 million streams, it’s the duo’s most popular track on Spotify, followed by an ethereal cover of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love.”)
Yet all that seems less important to George than taking the opportunity to honor “these incredibly talented, very sensitive people” who she says shaped the artist she became.
“Their songs just mean so much to me,” she says of Douglass and Littell. “More than ever, this is the music I want to listen to.”
